Hidden in plain sight, on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's campus is an incredible collection of maps. Atlas Obsura's Luke Spencer shares his visit.
It's an inconspicuous home for a storied collection: this is the final resting place of the library of the illustrious American Geographical Society. Once a powerhouse of exploratory resources, the organization had fallen on hard times in the late 1970s. The private donations and corporate funding on which they had been reliant, had reduced to a trickle, and the Society was forced to sell its imposing neo-classical headquarters in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. Eventually downsizing to a small rental office in Brooklyn, the Society was adamant that its unparalleled collection should be kept intact. Resisting the temptation to sell of its valuable archive, including the remarkable signed AGS Fliers and Explorers Globe, they undertook a nationwide search for a suitable home. As current AGS President, Professor Jerry Dobson explains, “The truth is that our revenues didn’t allow us to take care of the collection in a proper manner, so we held a national competition for a suitable repository.”
